The tramping turned itself into a sort of sentry-go up and down the long platform; and to go with it there was a lot of talk about things as they are, and things as they ought to be. Since he couldn’t talk freely at home—at least to anybody but Kathryn, and she, after all was said, was only a girl—Larry opened his mind to the fellow with whom, among all his late classmates, he had been most chummy.
“I don’t know; it looks as if a fellow never does know, until it’s everlastingly too late, Dick; but I shouldn’t wonder if I’m not taking that ‘line of the least resistance’ that Professor Higgins used to be always talking about. I guess I could make out to go to college this fall and grind my way through somehow, even without much money; in fact I’m sure I could if I should set my head on it. But then there are the home folks. Dad’s got about all he can carry, and then some; and Kathie and the others are needing their boost for the schooling—they’ve got to have it. I’ll leave it to you, Dick: has a fellow in my fix any right to drop out for four solid years—just when the money he can earn is needed most?”
It was too deep a question for Dickie Maxwell and he confessed it. What he didn’t realize was that it was made a lot deeper for him because he had never known how much brain or brawn, or both, it takes to roll up the slow, cart-wheel dollars in this world. He hadn’t had to know, because his father, in addition to being the railroad company’s general manager, was half-owner in one of the best-paying gold mines in the near-by Topaz range. True, Mr. Richard Maxwell was democratic enough to put his son into an engineering party for the summer, but that didn’t mean that the wages that Dick might earn—or the wages he might get without specially earning them—would make any real difference to anybody.
As the two boys tramped up and down the platform and talked, the stir around them gradually increased. Train gates and grilles were as yet unknown in Brewster, and intending travelers, with their tickets bought and their baggage checked, were free to wander out upon the platform to wait for their train—which they mostly did.
Dick Maxwell held his wrist watch up to the light of one of the masthead electrics. The “Flying Pigeon” from the west was almost due; but Number Eleven, the time freight from the east, had not yet pulled in, as they could see by looking up through the freight yard starred with its staring red, yellow and green switch lights.
“Eleven is going to miss making her time-card ‘meet’ here with the ‘Pigeon’ if she doesn’t watch out,” said the general manager’s son, who knew train schedules and movements on the Short Line much better than he did some other and—for him, at least—more necessary things.
“That will just about break Buck Dickinson’s heart,” Larry predicted. “Only day before yesterday I heard him bragging that since they gave him the big new 356 Consolidated he hadn’t missed a ‘meet’ in over two months.”
Again Dick looked at his watch.
“If the ‘Pigeon’s’ on time he has only thirteen minutes left,” he announced; and then: “Hullo!—what’s that?”
“That” was a small white spot-light coming down through the freight yard from the east. It was too little for an engine headlight—and too near the ground level. Somewhere up among the yard tracks it stopped; the switch lamp just ahead of it flicked from yellow to red; the little headlight moved on a few yards; and then the switch signal flicked back to yellow.